I found this reading to be very helpful. It's informative and short, so I felt I was best able to process the thoughts being shared. The idea of hierarchy is something I'm consistently trying to learn more about. As a writer, this will always be a prominent idea in my life, but I don't feel I truly grasped it's importance until these past few months. While I didn't understand what bothered me before--as I didn't know about half of the things discussed in this article-- when I finally ended up submitting my poetry to a journal, I was frustrated.
They made my poems ugly, and not in a I-love-my-car-partially-because-it's-hideous way. The formatting of my this journal bothered me. There was no thematic sense to the text. It felt like a messy book shelf that just gets filled however it fits in the moment; no one is taking time to make it look sorted and like a concious effort alongside each other shelf. While some of this problem is to do with grid, I believe a majority of it is font. This journal could easily look so much more professional with these things in mind.
Personally, though I do want to improve my skills with text and hierarchy starting with more basic ideas, I may try experiementing with each of the different elements listed. I hope to find a stylistic calling among these options. One day, once I publish a book, I want to be sure my text is clear, satisfying, and pretty. And if it's not? I want it to be that way because I made it so, as said at the beginning of the reading, "it’s impossible to break the rules effectively without first knowing what they are."
(Also, I really like the progress bar at the top of the page. It made me feel so much more productive and this reading to feel less daunting. I wish more articles had that sort of thing.)
This is one of my least favorite pages in the journal I was published in, for reference. The authors names should be smaller than the title. Both biographies have a bigger font than the right poem, implying higher importance. There is no decerniable grid. It pains me a little.
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